Nortel Buzzboard

The BBC recently tested out Nortel’s 40/100gig optical solution. No, not for deployment in their own network, but as part of the latest edition of Click, a weekly tech-focused program on the telly.

BBC Click traveled all the way to Nortel’s technology labs in Dallas for its latest edition on the future of communications. The show delved into a variety of technologies, including 40/100gig, telepresence, IPTV, WiMAX and LTE. Nortel even helped Click stage a mock health emergency to show how WiMAX can improve emergency care. Nortel associate fellow from MIT Andy Lippman and new WiMAX GM Scott Wickware are also interviewed during the show.

You can see the entire show via streaming …

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If you saw this morning’s news that Russian service provider Comstar was deploying a Nortel WiMAX solution in Moscow, you might have asked yourself “I thought Nortel got out of WiMAX.” And I wouldn’t blame you — shortly after we announced a strategic relationship with Alvarion that would allow Nortel to focus our R&D resources on the rapidly emerging LTE market, a few articles started appearing that boiled the news down to a snappy one-liner.

“Nortel ditches WiMAX” was a popular one, with various equally cringe-worthy examples being “Nortel dumps WiMAX” and “Nortel Flunks WiMAX.”

Of course, Nortel has not “ditched WiMAX” at all — we are working with Alvarion for WiMAX access solutions. Nortel is still dedicating resources …

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Over the weekend, Alex Lewis had this interesting post on the hyperconnectivity.com blog about the possibility of AT&T looking to deploy WiMAX. This is one of several recent articles that indicate a possible bright spot for WiMAX, which has been taking a PR drubbing of late in comparison to LTE technology.

Unstrung, which has been following AT&T’s WiMAX activities closely for some time now, had this new article Friday indicating that AT&T might be considering WiMAX for rural U.S. deployments, especially as rising copper costs make rural DSL deployments more expensive.

The article also highlights that AT&T already has a limited deployment of WiMAX technology in Alaska using 2.3 GHz equipment from Alvarion. Alvarion, of …

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There were a ton of articles that came out from yesterday’s news. Here’s my list of the more insightful ones:

Reuters has a nice summary of the news with quotes from the IR day event and several analysts, as does the Globe & Mail.
Telephony did a nice feature on the LTE/WiMAX news that included an interview with Scott Wickware.
Light Reading provided probably the most in-depth coverage of the Carrier Ethernet win with Verizon.
Barron’s debated which piece of Nortel news was responsible for the stock price increase.
The LTE vs. WiMAX debate raged on, with Network World talking about what it means to Nortel, and Tech Observer talking about what it means to the industry.
Total …

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Scott Wickware, new GM for Nortel’s WiMAX businessYesterday was a big news day for Nortel, so let’s start sorting through the details of some of it and what the news means for Nortel’s direction.

The item that got the most attention yesterday was Nortel’s news in the 4G wireless space. Nortel announced a change in R&D direction here, shifting it’s main R&D efforts to 4G LTE to address that market’s accelerating time schedule. At the same time Nortel announced a strategic WiMAX agreement with Alvarion where they will become Nortel’s supplier for mobile WiMAX base stations as part of an end-to-end WiMAX solution.

[UPDATED: Watch …

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I’m still working through all the media coverage from today’s Nortel news. I’ll be spending most of tomorrow focusing on going through the news, and highlighting the more interesting coverage.

Until then, I thought one of today’s articles was of particular interest. This article in Telephony talks about Nortel’s move to focus it’s future R&D resources on 4G LTE, and how the new relationship with Alvarion will help Nortel still play in the WiMAX market.

New GM of WiMAX solutions Scott Wickware is interviewed, and suggests that the Alvarion relationship began through a little matchmaking from one of Nortel’s customers:

“One notable customer suggested we get together with Alvarion,” Wickware said. “They felt …

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Things that stood out for me in Philippe Morin’s presentation on our Metro Ethernet Business:

3G and 4G is driving 25-40% a year growth in mobile backhaul traffic. Pretty impressive when you think that, really, 3G traffic is only now becoming mainstream in North America. The graph below shows some of our projections.
The Carrier Ethernet market is expected to grow 76% by 2011. As Philippe said in his preso, “If you’re going to bet on a technology, bet on Ethernet.” Kind of like what Verizon did this morning.
We’re expecting the market for 40G/100G to grow from $0.3B in 2008 to $2B in 2011. And we want to have a 30% share of that 2011 market.

…

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Some interesting tidbits from Richard Lowe’s presentation on our Carrier business:

Carrier staples, the CDMA and GSM markets, are expected to shrink in the next three years by 14% and 25% respectively.
Nortel’s key growth investments will be in 4G wireless technologies such as WiMAX and LTE. No surprise there, particularly since we announced next steps in this strategy this morning: a strategic agreement with Alvarion to bring a WiMAX solution to market faster and at a lower cost. And an announcement that we plan to focus our main R&D resources on 4G LTE.
The VoIP and applications market is expected to grow by 28% in 2011. Nortel is currently #1 in global VoIP and we plan on maintaining that …

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Mike Z opened up the day’s agenda with some of this thoughts on Nortel’s direction. I’m multitasking a bit with all the other news that has come out this morning, but there were a few items that I thought were really interesting from Mike’s presentation:

Mike mentioned today’s 4G news, specifically the new relationship with Alvarion. He said that the work with Alvarion will “allow us to leverage our R&D investments better.” This has been a topic in the past around Nortel’s investments in both WiMAX and LTE. Today’s news really seems to focus Nortel’s main investments on LTE for faster delivery in an accelerating market, while at the same time partnering Nortel with a company …

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It was already going to be a busy day here on Buzzboard with the Investment Analysts meeting hosted by Mike Z and company all day at Nortel’s headquarters in Toronto. Now in addition to that, this morning Nortel issued multiple press releases that include some significant news.

Here’s a quick summary of the news with links to the releases. I’ll be going through these in more detail as we get through the day with commentary and analysis:

First Nortel issued this release highlighting the Investor Meeting. All this release does is reconfirmed Nortel’s previously stated full year 2008 outlook in advance of this meeting between investment analysts and Nortel’s senior team.
Next, Nortel announced that Verizon had …

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